


the soul resembles

by toujours_nigel



Category: Night Watch - Sarah Waters, Return to Night - Mary Renault, The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 07:15:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3166094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laurie turns 21.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the soul resembles

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [No one of that name: eight fragments](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2862467) by [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht). 



The party was dreary like all of Charles’. Some day, Laurie thought, he would learn to stop expecting adventure or stimulation of any but the most obvious sort. The trouble was one forgot how ridiculous and affected most of Charles’ friends were, how smug about themselves. Just then the fashion was to claim a lack of belief in name-mates, a cliché rendered touchingly relevant by the youth of the declarants. Laurie, on the very verge of majority, was and had been for some weeks conscious of a suspect tenderness bruising his arm and a corresponding growth in his twitchy impatience with the vaunted indifference. It wouldn’t, he told himself, irritate him so if only they believed it themselves, but ten to one they’d be haranguing the registry clerks at the first sight of a golden pen-stroke.

It had been purest lunacy to come on the eve of his birthday, but he had been hoping for a last guiltless day with Charles and had been further beguiled by promises of something rather different from the usual run. Of course it was not one scrap unusual, though doubtless Charles sincerely thought himself successful. From somewhere he had produced two strangers: a dark young woman some years older than them smoking moodily by the window in a man-tailored jacket and staring hawkishly around, and an exquisitely beautiful young man wandering rather dimly about the room oblivious to the appreciative glances tracking him. Laurie, adept by now at looking at these parties and attaching himself to the people least likely to engage him in conversations about the innate futility of Names or conversely and equally nauseatingly pull him into conversations about how they had felt every pen-stroke and had known for years who their name-mate was to be but had been shy to the point of ignoring said person for the entire length of their acquaintance, made decidedly across the room to the woman, who greeted him with raised eyebrows and the beginning of a sardonic smile.

“Laurie Odell. How d’ye do?”

“Julia Standing,” she said, and took his hand in a surprisingly firm grip. “I believe it’s your birthday? Many happy returns. Here, have a cigarette.”

“Thanks very much.” He fumbled for a lighter for a second before resorting to the match-box left lying on the window-sill. “Not for some hours yet.”

“And you’re coming of age,” she observed, and then laughed a wisp of smoke at his surprise. “No, Charles didn’t tell me, it’s sort of my job to know.”

“Oh, you work in a registry.” Well. Perhaps Charles had done something beyond the ordinary after all.

But she was laughing. “Oh, no, nothing like that. Though my mother would probably think that a more respectable job. I’m a novelist, you see, observing people is rather crucial.”

“Oh Lord, you’re _that_ Julia Standing,” Laurie said, trying to remember one title, any title. Damn bloody blast.

“It’s not obligatory.”

“I really have read a few. The one with the letters and the tattooing and… I’m sure I’m conflating several.”

“No, no. I know which one you mean: _Scholar’s Leap_. Well, I suppose I oughtn’t be surprised that goes the rounds here. Can you see Julian? He’s the ravishingly lovely one. Never mind, I expect he’s boring people with a long rant about stage make-up. No, don’t laugh, really he probably is. Doesn’t get much chance to, back in Gloucestershire.”

“I thought he was an undergraduate,” Laurie said, a trifle startled.

“Two years older than you and saving himself for his name-mate,” Julia informed him. “I’ve been staying with his mother at Larch Hill, and he was very gallant about driving me up. Really I ought to have kept an eye on him.

He’d been putting the boy down at about eighteen, nineteen at the outer. Easy in the knowledge of adulthood, he ventured, “You might look around a little. People tend to go off by themselves at these things.”

“Yes, I do know. That’s what I’m afraid of, really. Julian’s a little excessive sometimes, and not very good with… oh, there, look. Behind the book-case.”

Someone previously obscuring the view had moved, and now the lovely Julian was visible sitting curled up like a cat on the settee, talking animatedly with a girl occupying the footstool. Julia, her sharp features softened by a sudden fond look, murmured goodbye and went to stand over him like an affectionate jailer.

 

After that he got drawn into the usual conversations, including one with a girl who desperately wanted to meet Julia Standing but was too shy to approach her, and had a whiff of adolescent crisis about her. By nine he was thinking of excuses; by ten stultified into passivity, wedged into an armchair and beginning to be drunk: if there was any food being offered it was not in evidence, and on the whole he suspected not: Charles brutally ransacked his father’s cellar for alcohol, but usually forgot that people liked to eat.

A little past eleven, when the party had emptied out, most people staggering off to their own rooms—the girls had left hours before, of course, arm-in-arm or trailing boys—and Julia and Julian talking very earnestly to an enthralled group of five, looking like nothing so much as siblings or each other, Charles came and perched on the arm of his chair, smiling fondly. For about a quarter-hour between eight and nine, he had disappeared with Freddy Willoughby, and thrown himself into being the perfect host ever since. Laurie had hardly had a minute with him, or any conversation beyond the perfunctory greeting.

Now he smiled ruefully and said, “Come along, then, I’ve got your present somewhere here.”

There probably would really be a present, it was one of Charles’ talents, like notes, but it was mostly an easy transparency designed to get them away and alone.

 

Of course, there was an innocent sort of thrill in the knowledge that he and Charles, who had until then only been playing around in an accepted sort of way—boys being boys—would soon be adulterous to an antique fussy imagination. Rot, of course, since Charles was certainly above-age and had been some time, and who would be _Cassandra Smythe_ for love or money? But the mind did wander even at these times and Lord knew, that was almost the only thrill involved, with Charles drunk and affected and desperately lacking in any finesse or indeed coordination. Surely it had to be getting on for midnight. Laurie himself had been born well after sunrise, a morning baby happy to ignore the laborious night, but one did hear stories: the stroke of midnight, the magic hour, the lover’s hand surfacing on skin in unnatural gold.

Suddenly it was as though he could see himself, squashed between Charles and the door, the knob uncomfortable against his thigh, disheveled and largely disinterested despite his body’s inevitable reactions, surveyed very coolly by an interested eye. He had looked like that himself, in his last year of school, at scruffy fags caught loitering. The original of the expression did not bear thinking of.

Charles sat back on his heels, spat and wiped his mouth with the cuff of his shirt. “You ought to warn a man,” he said pettishly, and then smiled. “Well, Happy Birthday, darling.”

Laurie, panting, still caught by the remembered eyes, said, “Thanks very much,” and went to his knees, embracing Charles. As a rule they didn’t kiss just after, but a deep kiss could make Charles frantic very quickly, and Laurie wanted nothing more than to be gone, from the claustrophobic room, the claustrophobic party, the stifling conversation. His arm, braced around Charles’ waist, was rubbed raw and beginning to hurt.

 

Leaving, he wandered for a while, relatively sure of being left undisturbed. Even if he was taken up, one’s twenty-first birthday constituted enough excuse for mildly erratic behaviour though too much could merit a lecture about taking up the mantle of tedious adulthood. It was a muggy night, Trinity drawing to a close, lights on in most of the colleges signalling people swotting into the night. Tomorrow, or the day after, he would be one of them: tonight he had fretted till the last second, weighing the chance of amusement against the inevitability of eventual revulsion.

Some people sat vigilant the night before. Laurie had gone off to a party and got off with a man he barely even liked, and not even as a mindless act of defiance against fate, or an assertion of his own preferences in that or any other direction. He believed with a boy’s sincere faith in whatever magic was beginning already to break skin and cut flesh to imprint a name into him; the hypocrites at the party, whom he despised, at least had an agenda, a sincere desire however vacuous or fleeting.

He wanted to rub himself raw. He wanted seven years between this night and the Name, but he had only about seven minutes. He never got away with anything. For the last three years he had tried to make nothing of it, the lack of a message, of communication. By then it had been very nearly habit to deflect any thought of Lanyon before it formed fully, and it had never given him pause for more than a minute here or there. Tonight, with nothing prompting it—Charles being darkly handsome in an epicene way—he had thought at the crucial moment of the thin, ascetic face with its determined mouth and the fine fair hair that was often falling on his forehead. In his mind now he smoothed away the lines about his mouth and eyes, turned the mouth up into a smile, made the eyes warmer. If they matched he would have a right to help, a claim that could not easily be set aside.

At midnight he was bolting up the stairs to his room, taking them two at a time, stumbling a little. His arm had begun to hurt in earnest now, and must be inflamed under the tight binding of his greaves. With the door bolted and blinds drawn against sunlight—for he meant to sleep well into the morning, and the summer sun in his east-facing room could not often be ignored—he threw his clothes off with hands that were shaking.

His left arm was paler than the rest of him, shielded from all weathers, and blotchily red. There was a hint of writing on it, but nothing like the brilliant gold he had seen on the arms of those who, happily matched or not, let all the world see their Name. Well. It had been well into the day when he’d been born, a matter of some ten or twelve hours yet. Though he liked the thought of the vigil, the pictures of knights alone in the chapel or of lovers sitting hand-in-hand, sitting alone and rather tipsy in his little room had none of the glamour that endeared those to him. Besides, his head was splitting from drink.

Still, sleep was slow in coming, and wracked with pain and strange dreams. A thousand men lying in trenches, dragging in the dust of other lands, planes flying overhead. Pain, great and terrible laying a claiming hand on his straining body.

He woke still hurting, earlier than his usual wont, both hands flying urgently to his leg, which had cramped badly. If he’d been swimming he’d have drowned. His last dream had been of drowning, and for a moment he thrashed around, disoriented, afraid to open his mouth lest it fill with water. Five minutes’ work carefully easing the knotted muscle left him weary and wide-awake, but at least the pain was receding. From his arm it had gone entirely: in its place—shining in the light creeping past the curtains—was _Andrew Raynes_ in a rounded, boyish hand.

Laurie stared at his Name with a curious sense of resignation, the emotional equivalent of raised eyebrows or a muttered “Well, then”. He had never allowed himself to do so dangerous a thing as _expect_ , and indeed, without much talent for self-deception, he had managed to hide from himself the fact that he had desperately wanted a certain name. Without the flash of memory and his subsequent self-indulgence, he would have treated this quite easily with all the joy it deserved. But now he could look at the name inscribed into his skin only with the knowledge that it was not the name he had placed there already in his unknowing mind.

There was no time for it, was the trouble. His mother was coming up to spend the day with him, and very possibly Aunt Olive also, and he would have to make himself presentable and pleasant and resign himself to a long day of having his Name admired and while they would sympathise if he told them the thought of Aunt Olive fussing or his mother trying to reason with him was just then unbearable. If he could have curled around his arm like Gyp did around injuries, he would have. Laurie, climbing slowly out of bed—wary of putting weight equally on both feet—finding his clothes and readying himself to face the day, seemed to himself to be doing only what was nearest in the absence of time to think. There was something here to be done which no one else could do. All the rest would have to be thought about later.


End file.
